Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're missing is that the CPU in Dell is the U series, which has a base TDP of 15 watts and goes up to 25 watts if the cooling is good. The CPU in MB Air is a 10 watt Y series, which is really weak (MacBook 12" leve weak). So you get miles more performance in Dell. Judging by the lack of comments on the CPU difference, Apple is really successful in fooling the public into thinking that a MB Air i5 is the same a…
You're right that they _are_ using different classes of CPU -- I'd not initially been able to find solid info on what CPUs the new Air was using which was why I left it off. I'm not sure I agree with the idea that the Air CPU is "a really weak CPU" compared to the Dell one though... just to clear this up I mean that the i5-1030ng7 is slightly less capable than the i5-1035g1, but the difference isn't huge. Here's a co…
It'd be interesting to see some numbers on the sustained performance from both of those and I couldn't find any benchmark that measures this kind of performance.
I'm concerned because I know from experience that the 12-inch Macbook 2016 is horrible for anything serious while the contemporary Dell XPS 13 9350 is very versatile. For me the Macbook stayed at 800 MHz most of the time, which made it unusable, while the Dell maintained at least a 2 GHz clock. Those laptops, too, show very similar performance numbers in Geekbench -
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/1555969?baselin...
Which means Geekbench samples those bursty clocks on the Y-series that get up for tens of seconds at most.
And while it may seem like bursty loads are okay for the average user, I'd say the reality is more complex - I routinely see my wife leaving lots of tabs open in her browser, which leads to some CPU usage, and sometimes some sites just decide they need to run heavy Javascript, Facebook for example is quite heavy. As soon as this happens, the Y series laptop would throttle down and impact other work. I saw it myself on the 12-inch Macbook, and given how Apple skimped on the cooling solution for the 2018 Air, I think the 2020 model may be prone to this as well.